With roughly 50 million lines of code, Windows is bound to have some bugs, and some of those bugs are bound to affect security. When flaws are found, Microsoft issues patches as fast as possible, but those patches do no good if you fail to apply them. Even if you're diligent, Patch Tuesday comes just once a month, so a vulnerability discovered the day after Patch Tuesday won't be patched until the next Patch Tuesday rolls around.
Last week, during Microsoft's third quarter fiscal 2015 earnings, company execs said Microsoft had hit an annual run rate of $6.3 billion for its commercial cloud.
This week at the company's annual Financial Analyst Meeting (FAM), CEO Satya Nadella said Microsoft's goal is to hit a $20 billion run rate for its commercial cloud by 2018.
Microsoft launched today a shiny new code editor for Windows, OS X, and Linux: Visual Studio Code. It's a smart looking text editor with IntelliSense support, git integration, and a few other bits and pieces that developers will enjoy.
What Microsoft didn't say when announcing the new editor was how it built Visual Studio Code. In a move that might seem a little surprising, given the regular animosity between the two companies, the editor is built on top of Chromium, the open source version of Google's Chrome browser.
In the conference call AMD hosted last week to discuss its first quarter results, CEO Lisa Su let slip with a piece of information that wasn't immediately caught: she said that Windows 10 would be released in late July.
Microsoft has previously said only that the operating system would be released in summer, giving it until September 23, the autumnal equinox, to launch the operating system. AMD's statement, which naturally Microsoft has not corroborated, is rather more specific.
Everyone’s used to receiving a few updates on Patch Tuesday, but today will be a bit different as Microsoft seems poised to push out an impressive number of patches in an unscheduled release.
Microsoft will deliver a developer preview of its new Azure Service Fabric -- its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technology for building microservices -- during the company's Build 2015 conference next week in San Francisco.
Service Fabric initially will be available for Microsoft's public cloud customers, but ultimately also will work on private and hosted clouds, too, said Mike Schutz, General Manager of Microsoft's Cloud Platform Product Marketing. The first target audience for the technology are startups and independent software vendors, he said.
Last week, Marissa Mayer took a big step toward undoing one of her predecessor's business deals by renegotiating Yahoo's search contract with Microsoft.
On Monday, the company filed a document with the SEC that gives some new details. It looks like Mayer drove a pretty hard bargain, and it could set Yahoo up to make more money from the search results it delivers.
Specifically:
Microsoft updated four critical flaws that could have left users vulnerable to attacks using remote code execution in a lighter-than-average Patch Tuesday.
The critical updates centre on vulnerabilities in HTTP.sys, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Graphics component.
The HTTP.sys patch will resolve a flaw in Windows that could allow remote code execution if an attacker sends a specifically crafted HTTP request to an affected system, said Microsoft. The vulnerability is understood to affect all versions of Microsoft Server from 2008 onwards.
Nokia is reportedly considering a sale of its prized navigation business HERE Maps, in a bid to fight its financial troubles. According to a new report from Bloomberg, Nokia is considering the sale in a bid to boost growth at its Nokia Networks business and/or reduce debt to improve its credit rating.
Last year when Microsoft announced an adapter kit that would allow Kinect for Xbox One sensors to work with Windows, some wondered whether the company would cease making Kinect for Windows sensors.
On April 2, we learned that the answer is yes.
Starting today, Microsoft will no longer be making Kinect for Windows v2 sensors, officials announced in a blog post. The Kinect Adapter announced last year does allow users to connect a Kinect for Xbox One sensor -- though not a Kinect for Xbox 360 sensor -- to Windows 8.0 and 8.1 PCs and tablets.
